Starlink

The initial intro thing is you flying an Arwing in space, shooting away at the baddies in 3D spinning space motion sick bleurgh!!!
Once the intro's over, the game moves to the planet, and you "fly" around shooting baddies, talking to locals, finding "towers", but so far no crafting or trading or things like that.

On planet "flight" is simply hovering over the ground, not actually "3D" flight. In space flight kicked off my motion sickness rather fast, so.. um.. that might be an issue!!

I've read that, later in the game, you get to travel between planets, but I don't think that's going to open up Elite style gameplay any time soon, plus like I say, motion sickness..

As it is, it's ... ok, so far.
I'm certainly glad I didn't pay much more for it, but I might change my mind later, who knows.

"StarFox/StarWing" never really appealed to me (despite owning it). Neither did "No Man's Sky", although there was some interest in the concept. This doesn't appeal at all - the paywall DLC puts me off even further.

As far as I can tell, so far, the DLC is only for extra ships and weapon types. I'm currently hopeful that you can purchase/build more weapons later in the game, but .. Yeah, they might've locked that behind a paywall. Grrr..

Current thoughts are that it's a nice big planet to explore, and I've got some guns to shoot things. The planet itself is rather barren, but "other planets" should help in that regard. Floating around and looking at things is giving me all the same "aimless wandering" thrills that BOTW did, so .. in that respect, I think it should be ok.
Time will tell.

Nightmare, last night..
Onslaught of weird black beetle like creatures coming from behind the kitchen counter.. eeek!!
Me and Mum each grabbed two tins of fly spray, and chased the beetles down.. at which point I became aware that A) this was definitely a dream, and B ), the whole "two triggers, running and shooting bugs" was directly influenced by StarLink..
I then continued the dream, and enjoyed killing all the bugs.

Warning : Fly spray doesn't work on beetles. It just makes them angry.

Finally got past the first big-battle, today, at which point I was able to take off from the planet, and had a nice space battle before heading to a new planet.
The new planet looked quite a lot like the old planet!!

Shoot the pillar 100 times
Now shoot the bigger pillar 100 times to destroy it.. *manages to hit it about 5 times*
NO WAIT!! Now the first pillar's respawned.. Shoot that 100 times again..
Now go for the big pillar again.. *shoots another 5 times*
OMG! The furst pillLLar is back and go shoot it omg¬¬!¬!¬

rinse, repeat for about 15 or 20 minutes or so, with various enemies trying to kill you at the same time.
Repetitive and dull, in the extreme!!!

Game continues. As you scour the planet, you find observatories which act like the turrets in BOTW, adding huge areas onto your map.
I've almost got the whole of planet 1 mapped out, but barely any of planet 2.

Each observatory has a number of "quests", but .. god damn, they're bland as fuck!!
"I need a rare element that can only be found at these exact co-ordinates"
Travel to co-ords, have a very fucking similar shooty time, pick up item, return..
Over and over and over and over.

Every quest so far has been exactly the bloody same.

GOTO X
SHOOT
RETURN

The planets are a little more varied than I originally thought, and when you're filling up the map, there are some nice vistas to look at.
But.. it's pretty much just "random landscape shape (hills, flat, etc) + random floor type (grass, sand, etc) + random plant type (cactus, squiggly bush, etc) + random thing to find (observatory, enemy base, etc)"
It's very formulaic, in a "I can see how this was coded" sort of way. BOTW was, too.. to an extent.. but it felt much more like a landscape, than a randomly generated splodge of land..